Smartphone cameras bring independence to blind people
19 August 2011 Last updated at 03:19 ET By Damon Rose Editor,
BBC Ouch!
VizWiz puts out the user's query to a panel of volunteer
helpers Snapping an image with your smartphone camera brings more
than just a pretty picture if you are blind. With the right app,
it can increase your independence.
Knowing what food is inside a packet or details about the post
which has just arrived on your doormat are everyday things that
most people take for granted.
Blind people have traditionally sought this kind of visual
information from family and friends, or from an employed personal
assistant. But this has meant having to fit in with other
people's time or spend significant money on help. Now there are
an increasing number of alternatives.
As smart phones become more accessible, some with built in
speech and Braille output, it is possible for people with sight
loss to get slivers of visual assistance when there's no one else
around to ask.
Want to know what colour your shirt is? Use a colour detector
app. Want to know if it is still daylight outside? Use a light
detector app. Want to read a notice on your work's noticeboard?
Use a text recognition app, of course.
What's in this jar? The most recent visual assistance product
to hit the app store is VizWiz. As well as giving you automated
image recognition from intelligent software, it throws your
questions open to a small band of volunteers standing-by on the
internet -- a human cloud, willing to donate ten seconds of their
time here and there to describe photos which come in.
On its website, the VizWiz is described as: "Take a Picture,
Speak a Question, and Get an Answer".
The free app and service, developed by the University of
Rochester in New York, has received between ten and 12 thousand
questions in its first two months. The volunteers are made up of
staff and students who receive a sound alert when a question
arrives, either via Twitter, text message or the web. They tap
in a response which is received by the original sender.
"The most popular type of question is a product that they have
which has text written on it, a label with instructions. People
want to know what it says, how to cook it or when it expires,"
said Professor Jeff Bigham, the man behind the service.
"We can very clearly track the time of day," explained Prof.
Bigham.
"In the morning people are asking about clothing, the colour or
pattern.
A few people ask if their shirt matches their pants."
"Around one or two eastern time we start getting questions
about wine from what we assume is the UK, asking what label, what
year, that kind of thing."
It is this kind of subjective answer that a piece of software
can't give and that a human service can. But humans need sleep.
Prof. Bigham admits that, though computer scientists are famed
for staying up very late, the 6am to 7am timeslot can be a bit
difficult to fill with volunteers from the university.
Human cloud "It's a really exciting time to work in access
technology. A great new resource is that there are people out
there on the web. Everyone is connected and we can do a lot of
interesting things with it," he said.
"People have been throwing around terms like Human Cloud for a
while, and Crowd in the Cloud.
"A lot of work which happened in crowd sourcing before it, took
time. Like Wikipedia, it 'took time' for articles to emerge.
What's interesting with our service is the realtime aspect of it.
Someone out there needs help from the cloud and, in almost real
time, they get it."
Users know that it is humans at the other end and this has
generated some "crazy" questions that could never have been
answered by automated recognition software.
"We had one person who kept taking a picture of the sky and
asking 'what is this` every 5 minutes for a couple of hours,"
said Prof. Bigham. "I had no idea what was going on. It also
happens we loosely monitor Twitter. Someone later tweeted
'VizWiz just helped me watch the sunset'.was
Blind photography In a perhaps unexpected 21st century
development, blind people are now finding they need to learn the
basics of photography in order to take advantage of the growing
number of text and image recognition services on smart phones.
How do you hold the camera up? And how close do you put it to
the object you want to know more about? Angles, perspective,
distance and light, are concepts that don't come naturally to
people who have never been able to see.
The oMoby app is capable of recognising products from a
photograph Steve Nutt is an IT consultant in Hertfordshire who
has been blind since birth. It took him two weeks to master how
to frame a shot which he does in a very functional way, quite
different to how sighted people would do it. He explains: "If
you're taking a picture of, say, a tin, you need to make sure you
get the whole tin in there. I would stand it up so you get all
the sides with the label and snap from about 8 inches above it.
"If you are taking a picture of some text on a piece of paper,
centralise the camera and lift it up about ten inches. Keep your
hand dead straight and dead still when taking the image. "You
have to also bear in mind the size of the thing you're taking the
picture of. the smaller the thing, the closer you need to be to
it ... I'd be lying if I said it was easy."
Jeff Bigham's team sees the results of the camerawork coming
from users like Steve. Not everyone gets it right with their
first shot.
"We definitely get a few attempts sometimes. It's not always
easy to frame the photos. Sometimes the centre is out of the
photo. if they're asking what is on a can of soup label, we
generally say 'we can't tell what this is, the label is likely on
the other side of the can'.was
_______________________________________________
ATI (Adaptive Technology Inc.)
A special interest affiliate of the Missouri Council of the Blind
http://moblind.org/membership/affiliates/adaptive_technology
